Analytics and Firefox Support

Over the past year, SUMO (also known as Firefox Support, Firefox Help, or support.mozilla.com) has grown into one of the most critical activities within the Mozilla community. David Tenser and the SUMO group have done a stellar job of maintaining a SUMO metrics report, and to complement that, I’ve recently been talking with David about the broader story of a typical user’s experience with SUMO.

There are a bunch of different ways that users can find SUMO and there are many different ways for users to interact with the site and get the help they’re looking for, so I thought it would be interesting to start outlining these user experiences at a high-level. In this discussion, I’d like to answer two questions:

How does a Firefox user get to SUMO in the first place?

What is a user’s most common interaction/experience on the site?

For question #1, there are two primary ways for a Firefox user to locate and arrive at SUMO. First, there’s a support option within the browser itself (i.e., inproduct). Click on “Help” at the top of your browser and you’ll see something called “Help Contents”. Users clicking here go directly to support.mozilla.com.

The second primary way for users to enter SUMO is through the main navigation bar at www.mozilla.com and localized Mozilla sites. The navigation bar for the mozilla.com web site includes five menu options – Products, Add-ons, Support, Community, and About. Users clicking on “Support” (depending on the localized version) go directly to support.mozilla.com.

So, how are Firefox users actually getting to SUMO in the first place?

Last month, SUMO saw 12.9 million visitors. Of these visitors, more than 71% entered the site via the “inproduct” path (Help -> Help Contents), about 13% entered the site via the main navigation menu on Mozilla’s web sites, and about 16% entered through some other path.

A few things seem surprising here:

That 71% slice of the pie is huge!

12.9 million visitors to SUMO (last month) is also a massive number. To put that in some perspective, last month about 4.3 million visitors entered the www.mozilla.com site through the home page. It’s not quite a fair apples-to-apples comparison, but still…

Continuing this discussion, we’ll soon post some analysis around question #2 – What is a user’s most common interaction/experience on the site?

2 responses

It’s not good that those in-product pages don’t have a language selection box.

At this time, Vietnamese users are using en-US versions of Firefox. I have seen some people trying to look for help via Help menu. However, without a language selection box on those in-product pages, they thought that SUMO was only available in English and left the site.

(Vietnamese users got to use en-US versions because there hasn’t been a Vietnamese Firefox version available. They may be familiar with the English terms, but many of them can’t read a full English article.)